Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [120]
He came home, looking happy and radiant, ‘With the moon on his forehead,’ as his nurse used to say, sat down in the corner of the sofa and quickly wrote in large letters on the dust-covered table: ‘Olga.’
‘Oh, what dust!’ he exclaimed, recovering from his ecstatic state. ‘Zakhar! Zakhar!’
He shouted again and again, because Zakhar was sitting with some coachmen at the gate that faced the lane.
‘Go on,’ Anisya said in a stern whisper, pulling him by the sleeve, ‘the master has been calling for you for a long time.’
‘Have a look, Zakhar, what’s this?’ Oblomov said, but in a gentle and kind voice, for he could not be angry just then. ‘You want everything to be in a mess here too, do you? Dust, cobwebs! No, my dear fellow, I shall not permit it! As it is, Olga Sergeyevna doesn’t give me a moment’s rest: “You like dirt,” she says.’
‘It’s all very well for them to talk like that, sir,’ Zakhar remarked, turning to the door. ‘They have five servants, they have.’
‘Where are you going? Will you sweep the room at once, please? It’s impossible to sit down here, or lean on the table. Why, this is horrible – it’s – it’s Oblomovitis!’
Zakhar looked hurt and glanced sideways at his master.
‘There he goes again!’ he thought. ‘He’s invented another pathetic word, a familiar one, too!’
‘Well,’ said Oblomov, ‘why don’t you get on with the sweeping?’
‘There’s nothing to sweep here, sir,’ Zakhar observed stubbornly. ‘I’ve already swept the room to-day.’
‘Where’s the dust come from, if you’ve swept it? Look at it! There and there! I will not put up with it! Sweep it all up at once!’
‘I did sweep it,’ Zakhar repeated. ‘You don’t expect me to sweep the rooms ten times a day, do you? The dust comes from the road – we’re in the country here, sir: there’s a lot of dust on the road.’
‘You shouldn’t sweep the floor first and dust the furniture afterwards,’ Anisya said, suddenly peeping out of the other room. ‘The room is bound to be covered in dust again. You ought first to – –’
‘Who asked you to come here and teach me what to do?’ Zakhar wheezed furiously. ‘Go back to your place!’
‘Who ever heard of sweeping the floor first and dusting the furniture afterwards? That’s why the master is angry.…’
‘Now then, now then!’ he shouted, pushing out his elbow as though intending to aim it at her breast.
She grinned and disappeared. Oblomov waved him out of the room too. He put his head on the embroidered cushion, put his hand to his heart, and began listening to its beating.
‘This is bad for me,’ he said to himself. ‘What’s to be done? If I ask the doctor’s advice, he will probably send me to Abyssinia!’
Before Zakhar and Anisya were married, they did their own work in the house without interference – that is to say, Anisya did the shopping and the cooking and helped with the tidying of the rooms only once a year, when she scrubbed the floors. But after their marriage, she found freer access to the master’s rooms. She helped Zakhar, and the rooms were cleaner, and, besides, she took some of her husband’s duties upon herself, partly of her own accord and partly because Zakhar despotically laid them upon her.
‘Here, beat the carpet, will you?’ he wheezed authoritatively. Or: ‘You’d better sort out the things in that corner there and take what isn’t wanted to the kitchen.’
He spent a month in this blissful state: the rooms were clean, his master did not grumble, or use ‘pathetic words’, and he, Zakhar, had nothing to do. But the state of bliss came to an end – and for the following reason. As soon as he and Anisya began to look after Oblomov’s rooms together, everything Zakhar did turned out to be stupid. Whatever he did was wrong. For fifty-five years he had lived in the world in the conviction that whatever he did could not be done better or differently. And now, suddenly, Anisya proved to him that he was a wash-out, and she did it with such an